A Contrapuntal Duet in Place of a Heroic Symphony? EU‑UK Relations and Brexit in Three Spy Novels

Even before Brexit, arguably, there occurred a re‑examination of Britishness by Britons themselves, and not only at the level of politics. This collective re‑assessment of their place in relation to their most important economic partner could have led to a view of the EU as a fellow performer on the stage of world affairs, at least an “opposite number” in the representation of things offered by British-produced spy fiction.Three books testified to the problematic relationship the UK had enjoyed with even an incipient union of Europe: Jonathan Coe’s Expo 58 (2013), Alan Judd’s Accidental Agent (2019) and John le Carré’s Agent Running in the Field (2019).The re‑examination of British identity occurring there, however, is somewhat skewed to begin with, since early on in the process, there emerges all-too-apparent misgivings about renouncing the categories of the national heritage to recompose Britishness in light of its European alters. The Special Relationship also actively precludes any chance of an opening onto Europe, which remains in a sense imaginatively incommensurable to the UK, and therefore, not a partner in any effective terms, even in fiction. In our corpus, incommunicability, then, is the final word on UK‑EU relationships.